Bracelet idea to help schoolmate catches on

Wednesday

Feb 8, 2017 at 9:34 AM

Luke Smucker

It wasn’t meant to be a big deal. When 10-year-old Maria Long decided to do something to help raise funds for Johnathan Becker, a fifth-grade student at her school, St. Mary’s, who has been diagnosed with cancer, she guessed that only family and close friends would be interested. After all, the bracelets are little more than wire with a heart-shaped clasp and and a cross-shaped charm. “The first couple hundred orders came really fast, I think we had 240 in less than 48 hours,” Maria’s mother, Rhiannon Long, said. “It was a complete surprise because we figured we’d sell 50 and raise $150 and that would be that.” In addition to the initial 240 bracelets that were purchased over the weekend of Jan. 28, 100 more orders were placed last week. With orders continuing to trickle in today, the Long family has made a revised goal of $1,000, a goal they will be surpassed once these initial 343 orders are filled. “I sent his mother a message on Facebook after we started getting a flood of orders,” Rhiannon said. “I said, ‘if that doesn’t tell you something about this community, what does?’ “I have some friends who are school teachers. They said they are going to use Maria’s story as a message to their classes. They are going to talk about kids helping kids and paying it forward. I think some of the sales are because people want to support the story, but I think most of them are because of Johnathan.” Maria is raising funds for a peer she has never met. She started at St. Mary’s for the first time this year, as a fourth grader. She was inspired to raise money for Becker after hearing about him in class. She went home and told her family she wanted to do something to help. After contacting Johnathan’s family for approval to go ahead with the fundraiser, the next step was finding a product to make. “We looked on Pinterest for craft ideas that we could make to sell,” Maria explained. “We saw these metal bracelets and I thought they were cool. We looked at a few different bracelet ideas, but we settled with one because we liked the heart on it. We also wanted something that would be easy to make.” Once the family decided on the price point of $3 per bracelet, Rhiannon Long snapped a few pictures and explained what her daughter was doing on Facebook. The rest, as they say, is history. “I’d say within about seven hours, we had 150 orders. It was like, ‘what?’” Rhiannon said. “We’ve never really done anything like this before, so we were pretty excited when the orders first started coming in. “It made us realize, how many times could we have done something small like this, but we don’t because we assume it won’t amount to much? I think the next time we have the opportunity to do something like this, we’ll just go ahead and do it.” As great as it is to take in more than 340 orders, the next step is to fill them. Initially only anticipating 150 orders, the family purchased the first batch of materials on their own. As they began to run out, close friends and family members began to donate the supplies with thank you cards and words of encouragement for Maria and her family. All members of the Long family have chipped in to make at least a few bracelets, but Maria tends to make the majority of them during the drives from Pontiac to Bloomington for basketball practice. “It’s amazing what you can do in a week,” Rhiannon said. “It’s been very humbling to see how the community steps up to help a child in need. It has also helped our family grow closer because everyone is working on this together.” The family will continue to make bracelets as long as people keep ordering them. In addition to the bracelet, there is also a small hand-written thank you card, signed by Maria, with each order. “We just want to thank everybody because it’s something that we could do, which doesn’t take a lot of effort on our part and helps out the family,” Maria said. “It’s so much more than we could have ever done on our own. It made me realize, even if you don’t think something will happen, just go ahead and try because you never know, it could turn into something really big.”

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